Case studies of community microgrid incorporating renewable resources and EV charging station

• Main Author: Yue, Kit Chong
• Other Authors: Gooi Hoay Beng
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Electric power
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/61262
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

A microgrid is a localized grouping of electricity generation, energy storage, and load that most of the time operates connected to a traditional centralized power grid. A microgrid system was set up in Laboratory for Clean Energy Research to study the power flow and investigate the operation of microgrid under various practical conditions. 16 case studies have been carried out using simulation software (PowerWorld) to investigate the effects of weather have on the performance of the microgrid followed by 10 hardware experiments carried out using the microgrid setup in LaCER to verify the software results and observe microgrid performance in real life. 30 case studies have been set up in PowerWorld to study how microgrid reacts and performs when electric vehicles (EVs) are incorporated into the system. 10 case studies have been carried out using the OPF algorithm to observe its contribution in improving the microgrid system efficiency. 20 case studies have been carried out using both software and hardware to study the relationship between load demand variation and performance of the microgrid. Experiment results have shown that microgrid efficiency is higher when power generations of distributed renewable resources (including EVs) are high. It was also observed that some of the hardware experiment results were not exactly similar to the software simulation results due to some practical real life issues. The details of experiments carried out and results obtained will be elaborated in the later parts of this report. In a nutshell, benefits of using distributed energy sources can be clearly observed from the software and hardware experiment results and efficiency of the microgrid can be improved effectively by using the OPF.